A Private Venus (6 page)

The mammoth fifteenth-century door, in marked contrast to the modesty of the building, was closed, but he didn’t even look at the door, he whistled and Lorenza appeared at the window on the first floor with her child in her arms.

‘I didn’t think I’d heard right, I wasn’t expecting you at this hour,’ Lorenza said, throwing him down the keys.

‘This is a friend of mine, make us some coffee.’ He led Davide up the short flight of stairs. ‘The apartment is old and small, and has a double supply of cockroaches, they come in from the street and also the courtyard. We won’t be here long, though.’

Lorenza was on the landing, with the child in her arms. She was in dark pyjamas and her shoulder-length hair was gathered into a ponytail by a common elastic band.

Duca took the child in his arms and made the introductions, by pure chance Sara wasn’t soaking wet. ‘Has she already done it or is she about to?’ he asked Lorenza.

‘She’s done it, I only just changed her.’ Lorenza’s dark eyes were looking at him happily, she even looked happily
at Davide. It was her way of looking at life: even when she came to see him in prison she looked at him like that, she talked to him like that, in that happy voice: ‘The lawyer says everything’s going to be fine.’

‘Then I’ll hold her, and come with you to the kitchen while you make the coffee.’ He turned to Davide, who was sitting motionless on a rickety chair. ‘Excuse me, Davide, I’ll be right back.’ In the kitchen, he walked up and down with Sara in his arms: she was a quiet child, as long as she was in someone’s arms, otherwise she screamed as if her throat was being cut.

‘My cigarettes are in the right-hand pocket of my jacket.’

Lorenza took them out, lit one, and put it between his lips.

‘In the left-hand pocket I have a cheque and some money. Take all the money and leave me the cheque.’

As she took all the notes from his jacket pocket, Lorenza turned pensive. She put them in a drawer in the kitchen table and lit the gas under the already prepared coffee maker. ‘What is this, Duca?’

‘It’s an advance for my job.’ He blew the smoke in the opposite direction from the child. ‘It’s a job I’m able to do, don’t worry, Carrua found it for me. I may not be able to come and see you for a while, that’s why I came today.’ And also to give her the money: on the baby’s high chair there was a roll, a sign that Lorenza had not been able to buy the Plasmon biscuits she usually got.

‘But what is it you have to do?’ Lorenza had become more fearful about things since Duca had been in prison,
since their dad had died, since she had found herself alone and the doctor had told her one day that in his opinion she was pregnant. Fear made her large, beautiful mouth narrow a little.

Without going into too much detail, he explained what he was supposed to do with the young man who was in the other room, and they went back in there with the coffee and found him where they had left him. Duca kept the child in his arms for the rest of the visit, it was a risk because if Sara decided to pass water it could well ruin his new suit, his only suit, but Sara’s little hand around his neck and the other hand feeling for his nose, her laughing blue eyes, her stammering of a few syllables, were worth it: it was a calculated risk. In the meantime he was watching Davide, but there wasn’t much to see. The lack of alcohol made him even more alien to this everyday world. He had even stopped answering questions, except with a smile or a nod of the head, and he was also a little pale: he would need refuelling again before he lapsed into another depressive state.

‘We’re going.’ He gave Sara back to his sister, completely dry.

‘When will you be back?’ Lorenza asked.

‘Hard to say. I’ll phone you.’ In the car he said to Davide, ‘Hold on a while longer. We’re going to the barber now, then we’ll go to a good bar near here.’ Davide smiled, and gave a little nod of gratitude. At the barber’s Duca had a shave, too. They sat next to each other, and in the mirror he saw Davide half close his eyes every now and again: if he fell asleep it would be a blessing.

He fell asleep.

‘Psst.’ Duca spoke under his breath to the barber. ‘We’ve been driving all night, he’s tired and not feeling very well. Let him sleep, at least until it gets busy.’

‘It won’t get busy today.’ The barber was an understanding man, a man who’d seen everything: he left Davide with lather on half his face and lit a cigarette.

Duca had his own hair cut by the barber’s assistant, a young man from Como who, unlike the barber, had seen nothing and had never predicted, among the many events that might occur in the world, the possibility of a man falling asleep at the barber’s, although, he said in a low voice, he himself had once fallen asleep in a café in Como, which was so unlike him that he would remember it for the rest of his life.

With his hair cut and his beard shaved, he started talking to the old barber, looking every now and again at his watch and every now and again at Davide: every minute that passed was a minute less to drink alcohol and a minute more to get reorganised. Perhaps he would sleep until midday, but at 10:15 an old customer came in, a noisy Milanese, the very kind who finds so much success on television, a thin bony man, vaguely hateful for his vulgarity and his wine-red face, who yelled out a Fascist slogan as he entered.

So Davide woke up, realised that he had been asleep, and on the cheek that was free of lather Duca could see the red mark, but the old barber knew his job, he was ready, he finished shaving him and they left.

‘Sorry I took you there,’ Duca said, ‘your usual hairdresser’s
may be a more pleasant place.’ He got no answer. He pulled up outside a bar in the Via Plinio. ‘This is the best bar in the area. Order whatever you like.’

He didn’t look at Davide as he drank a double whisky, but only said, ‘Drink slowly, I’m not in any hurry.’

The sleep and the whisky had revived Davide a little. Back in the car, he said, ‘I must be quite a burden to you.’

‘A bit,’ Duca said, driving. ‘But I like you.’ Reaching the Piazza Cavour, he turned into the Via Fatebenefratelli, and parked in the Via dei Giardini. ‘Wait for me here. I have to go to Police Headquarters. I’ll leave the car keys, but remember what I told you this morning: don’t do anything stupid as long as I’m with you. If you’re not here when I get back, I’ll come looking for you, and I hope for your sake I find you already dead, because I don’t rate your chances if I find you alive. And don’t start drinking again.’

Davide nodded his head several times, without smiling. He would be there when Duca got back: he was an honest young man.

As Duca entered Headquarters, the memory of his father hit him like a punch, and a black veil fell over him. Whenever, as a boy, he had come in with his father through that door, crossed that courtyard, climbed those stairs, walked through that corridor and, in the little room, not much more than a cubbyhole, that his father called an office, his father raised his left arm when he could, in other words, not very much after the stab wound he’d got in Sicily, and pointed to the chair, as if it actually was a chair rather than a little bench with a plank as a back and said to him, ‘Sit there and study,’
he would place on his knees the schoolbook that his father had told him to bring, and start to read and reread, and when he needed to write, his father would lend him a corner of his own little table, which passed, however improbably, as a desk. In that way, in that place, he had studied many aspects of infinitesimal calculus, chemistry, and even projective geometry.

But this morning he walked along a different corridor, a more silent, deserted one, there was only one officer outside the door of Carrua’s office. A new officer who, before letting him in, wanted a lot of explanation and looked as if he might want to search him. In the end, Carrua himself came out, shouting.

‘You let in all kinds of nuisances I don’t want to see and when a friend of mine comes you keep them outside.’ Carrua may never have spoken normally, he either shouted or kept silent. ‘How did it go with Auseri?’ he screamed at Duca as soon as they were inside the office.

He told him how it had gone and thanked him for finding him the job. ‘It’s quite an unusual job, but I like it, even though it’s not very clear-cut.’

‘What’s not very clear-cut about it?’

‘I find it hard to believe it’s all about a young man who drinks. There must be something else.’

‘What kind of thing?’

‘I don’t know. The kind that might also be of interest to the police.’

Silence. Superintendent Luigi Carrua was looking at him. He was an old friend of his father’s, Duca must have been
five or six years old the first time he had looked at him, and since then they had met on thousands of occasions and Carrua had looked at him thousands of times, but he still couldn’t get used to that look: when Carrua looked at you, you felt naked. He was short, not fat, weighed down by thirty years of police work, even though grey his hair was long and neatly back-combed, without a receding hairline, and he looked more like a bank official than a police officer. Except when he stared into your eyes. ‘If you take after your father,’ he said in an unusually low voice, ‘then maybe there
is
something. Your father was never wrong.’ He raised his voice again. ‘But you’re a doctor, not a policeman. The Auseris would never have anything to do with the police.’ The telephone rang, he picked it up and listened, then shouted again, ‘All right, let them do the post-mortem again, I’m not the bloody sawbones.’ He turned back to Duca and shrugged. ‘They still say Superintendent Carrùa. That was another one. They’ve known me for ten years and every day I tell them: Càrrua, please, with the stress on the first
a
, not Carrùa with the stress on the
u
, but it never works: Carrùa is what they have in their heads and Carrùa is what they say.’

He smiled. The man’s one weakness was the correct pronunciation of his name: it was his secret wound and one that seemed likely never to heal, because people instinctively said Carrùa and it never even occurred to them that they should be pronouncing it Càrrua. He became serious again, he seemed upset.

No, Duca didn’t like the job. ‘If, while looking after this young man, I end up discovering something not entirely
above board, what should I do? Engineer Auseri is your friend.’

The shout this time was more forceful. ‘You won’t discover anything because there’s nothing to discover about Auseri. We were at school together, we did our military service together, we’re growing old together in this filthy world, he has a son who’s a bit backward, but who won’t even step off the pavement if the light isn’t green. Auseri’s son drinks because he’s backward, that’s all. But you, being the intelligent man you are, will teach him to prefer lemon juice.’

Then Duca laid it out for him clearly, because what was the point in life of being the son of a policeman, or the protégé of a highly placed official in Headquarters, if the wheels got jammed and you were crushed anyway? They had got jammed with Signora Maldrigati, and he didn’t want to be crushed again. ‘Listen to me. Maybe I won’t discover anything, which will be better for me, but if I discover the slightest thing, I’ll come here and bring it to you on a silver platter and resign from this job. I don’t want to have anything to do with people or things that are outside the law. That’s not an excessive demand, is it?’

Instead of the shouting he was expecting, silence. For a long time. Then Carrua stood up abruptly and at last screamed, ‘You must have a reason to think there’s something there that’s outside the law.’

‘I didn’t want to tell you, because maybe it isn’t a reason,’ he replied loud and clear, ‘but last night your friend’s son tried to kill himself by slitting his wrists. I found him just in time. He’s outside right now, alive and well, waiting for
me. But a young man that age doesn’t try to die if there isn’t some underlying cause.’

‘And didn’t he tell you why?’

‘No, just as for the past year he hasn’t told his father why he drinks like that, without any friends or acquaintances driving him to it. And the more I asked him, the less he would tell me.’

‘A lot of people kill themselves for no reason.’

‘Davide Auseri isn’t a young girl who’s been seduced. He may be young, but he’s a man. And he isn’t backward, as you think, or as his father thinks. If he wants to die he has a serious reason, and serious reasons, for a man, always have something to do with the law. I’ve already had enough dealings with the law. Which is why I’ve come here to tell you that, if there’s something not right about this, I’m dropping everything.’

No shouting. Carrua sat down again. ‘You’re right.’ He had grown sad. He had done everything he could to help Duca, to protect him, to avoid him being put on trial and going to prison. There had been nothing he could do: the wheels had got jammed. ‘I don’t think you’ll find anything, but if you do, come and tell me straight away and I’ll find you another job.’ Before opening the door, he gave him a hug. ‘Try to hold on. Another year or two, and they’ll let you back on the register, everything will be the way it was before, you’re still young.’

He let Carrua believe that was what he was hoping for, even though he knew that hope was a kind of secret vice that nobody ever managed to rid themselves of completely.
‘Thank you for everything you’ve done for Lorenza,’ he said, hugging him tight.

When he came out into the Via Fatebenefratelli, into the damp sunlight that was as hot as shaving cream from a luxury hairdresser, it struck him that if he didn’t find Davide and the Giulietta in the Via dei Giardini, then he had really messed up. But he had had to take the risk: otherwise he would never have known whether he could trust the young man, or what he was made of.

Davide was in his place, walking up and down next to the Giulietta in the incipient shade given by the trees at that hour. Duca saw him from the back, tall, monumental, and felt sorry for him. Whatever the reason, he must be very unhappy. ‘Thank you,’ he said to him, getting behind the wheel. ‘Let’s just drop by the bank, and then I’m sorry if I take you somewhere a little sad, but I’m going to see my father’s grave.’